Even though the news was only broken a couple of hours ago, by now everyone knows that Google plans to kill off Google Reader at the start of July. I really do fail to see how a service that is still used by so many people – despite the claims that usage has dropped so far – is being removed, without much of an alternative being offered.

Where’s the “No, it’s not OK” button?
They can say that the advent of social media has dropped the requirement for an RSS reader, however the premise of social media couldn’t be further from the premise of a feed reader. With social media being designed generally for content to be instantly digested, a feed reader allows content to be made available to people to be digested at a time that suits. I know that this premise is available as an app for your smartphone, I just can’t think of the name of it off the top of my head.
While Twitter and Facebook lists are a potential alternative, they don’t offer much in the way of filtering the content, nor do they easily showcase what content is new for you. Twitter has no “new content” flag, and while Facebook does have an unread figure on pinned lists, this number is dubious at best, and once it goes over 20 shows an unhelpful “+” mark instead of an accurate figure. A similar thing could be said for site-specific dashboards like on WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr etc.
The lack of good integrated alternatives is also disappointing. I haven’t used a desktop mail client in at least four years now, not since I moved my e-mail and all other services to using Google Apps. Before that I was using the feed reading capabilities of Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail desktop – which makes sense given how feed reading is somewhat similar to e-mail reading.
My usage of Reader extends further than just the dashboard. If you see my Blogroll page, you’ll find the embedded subscription widgets from Google Reader of all of the sits I’m subscribed to. (Well, those I’m willing to make public, that is...)
As much as I’d love to post an image of my overall Google Reader stats here, my stats are broken when I had to migrate my feeds over from my old Google account to my current one once Reader was made available for GApps customers. However, in two-and-a-half years on my current account, I’ve read over 66,000 items.
Hopefully Google will turnaround on this decision and keep Reader active come July. Or at the very least, they merge the Reader functionality into GMail given how close they are to each other.
Also, I do have to wonder how many people have read this post, having had it show up in their own Google Reader?
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